The Decadent Opulence of Modern Capitalism

America Is Becoming an Upper-Middle-Class Country

I recently posted an update on didacticism in art and increasingly not just in highbrow art but in popular culture. Just after posting that, I came across two quick follow-ups.

One is a New York Times article bewailing the collapse of live theater. The article is mostly a lot of whining about the need for a federal bailout. There is no serious examination of whether the content of today’s art—or rather, the absence of artistic content—might have something to do with it.

But the article that really captures the unique style of the current moment is an overview of recent reviews of the Barbie movie, which focus almost entirely on its “woke” politics. I do not intend to write anything about this film, except to note how silly everyone else is to be talking about it. Yet that’s our current moment in a nutshell: loud didactic political pontification shoved into the vehicle of lowbrow popular culture.

But my real goal today is to work through an issue that is even more indescribably silly, the Great Socialist Banana War, to get to something that is actually important—and very, very good.

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Yes, We Have No Bananas

I sort of missed out on the Great Socialist Banana War and had to catch up on it by way of a few of the newsletters I read (there are some good comments here). The upshot is that one group of socialists declared that, come the revolution, there will be no bananas in the supermarket, because we wealthy Westerners will just have to tighten our belts to stop the exploitation of the global proletariat, i.e., farm workers in Ecuador—who will somehow be helped if no one is consuming one of their largest exports.